Assistant Professor of English Brian Brodeur will lead the first workshop on Saturday, February 6. Additional workshops will be held Saturday, March 5, and Saturday, April 2.

This Saturday, Brodeur will present “Hearing Voices: Dramatic Monologue, Persona, and the Lyric.” Persona is often linked with narrative and dramatic poems, while lyric, with its emphasis on personal emotion, implies a shared identity between speaker and poet. But lyric poets routinely employ poetic masks to say what they cannot say in their own voices. The workshop will provide for a lively consideration of how these often competing modes complicate what writers think about the slippery first-person pronoun that led Czeslaw Milosz to claim “the purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain one person.”

Brodeur is the author of three collections of poetry: Natural Causes, Other Latitudes, and Local Fauna.

Upcoming workshops will be held Saturday, March 5, and Saturday, April 2.

During the March 5 workshop, Assistant Professor of English Sarah Harris will present “Fiction in a Flash,” or fiction under 1,000 words, which allows writers to play with the essential elements of a short story in a condensed way of writing. Short fiction encourages focus and teaches writers to solve problems connected to character, plot, and detail.

In this workshop, participants will use flash fiction as a way to get into writing by discussing stories and using a variety of exercises and prompts to create their own flash fiction. Participants will leave the workshop with their very own flash fiction story, and some additional exercises to help them to continue to work on it after the workshop is over.

At IU East, Harris directs the writing program. Her flash fiction has appeared in the journal NANO Fiction, where she was the recipient of the third annual NANO Prize for flash, as well as the journals SpringGun and Quarter After Eight.

Assistant Professor of English Steven Petersheim will present “Nature Writing: Inhabiting and Observing the World” on April 2. In this workshop, participants will be given tools to experiment with the genre of nature writing as they put words to the relation between themselves and the natural world we inhabit as humans. Participants may bring several photos of natural scenery to explore ways of allowing the natural environment to work its magic as writers put pen to paper.